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Taylor Peters 418: S & R

Landfill Virtualization

Canada is the world’s highest per capita municipal solid waste producer. By 2000,

Canadians produced more annual waste per person than Americans; and by 2005, Canada

produced nearly twice as much garbage as Japan (Conference Board of Canada). By, 2006

Canadians produced over 1000 kg of waste per person; 35 million tons of waste in a single

calendar year (Statistics Canada). The bulk of this waste ended up in landfills, and in 2010, thirty

percent of existing Canadian landfills reached or surpassed capacity; in response over one

million tons of waste were exported out of Canada and into the U.S. (a larger scale waste

nightmare) (Statistics Canada). Some cities have settled on new landfill locations, on spreading

the problem out as a means of extending/abating the issue, some have increased regulation only

to discover significant problems with risk and impact assessment, but all models so far only end

up resulting in furthering the production of waste as a monument, or testament to the degrading

relationship between humanity (IWC) and the environment.

This type of solid waste production is emulated in every country throughout the world.

Some have curved their impact through means of recycling and green energy movements, but

worldwide, landfills are a prism through which social scientists refract the politics and

economics of consumption; they’re abysmal areas where things go to be forgotten. Landfills also

stand upon the boundary/the intersection, of urban­rural divides; health standards countrywide;

gender and waste economics; and more. Landfills, as representations of the mass of the things we

try to forget, tell us a great deal about ourselves, our consumption, our relations within

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communities, with the environment, and with global society. Waste, the landfill’s necessary

precursor, is invested with the diversity of meanings making up its production, use, and eventual

transition to trash. Yet, despite its ubiquity, and despite the signature culture leaves on waste,

“waste exist[s] in the twilight zone where no clear, ‘natural’ definition of [it] can be given,

within wide margins of uncertainty and variation” (Wynne). Like other contemporary

environmental concerns, waste is associated with the excess of society, a trademark of the

international “American” ideology, and coping with excess, even demanding excess, is

essentially what passes for having individual freedom. With Serres’ understanding of our species

as the “master and possessor of nature” (40), modern capitalism’s definition of waste in

economic terms is simply “resources that are out of place”, or matter out of place, and

concentrates on transforming it from a material burden and use of potential space (for more

trash) into further economic potential. Waste management models, like Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

and Green Energy movements, further serve as vehicles to further shift attention away from the

detriment posed by industry and production, and shifts focus instead on the benefits of a

“conscious” consumer and household models that encourage the notion that environmentalism

has to start with the individual.

Waste is a monument to all that we once wanted, and now do not want, once valued, and

no longer care for. Waste, and landfills specifically, from any side of the road abandoned car lot

to the the monumental Roosevelt Regional Landfill in Arlington, WA, exist as an ironic

testimony to their own creation in that they are founded in the act of trying to forget. Forgetting

waste means to hide it away. It starts the moment we place trash in the trash bag, in the trash can.

From this point the trash isn’t meant to make an appearance in the household, or outside a

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dumpster, any unauthorized appearance can comprise any party that the trash leads back too.

Social status and the power of nations is aligned with the structures making up the formation of

cleanliness and disposal in society. The formation of landfills represent a figure encompassing

the greatest acts of human and cultural cooperation in human history. The Roosevelt Regional

Landfill takes in 2.5 million tons of waste annually from Washington, Oregon, Canada, and

Alaska (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5dvGzAT_2c). The amount of individual and

group cooperation that goes into creating the mounds of soaring garbage, mountains and valleys

of trash between urban and rural centers, represents the largest accumulation of human activity in

history (besides maybe the internet). The mass of contribution, the personal scale of contribution

to the monument that is waste, and is then again, landfills, depends upon society, or rather

society, depends on it, in a temporal loop of disposal, regeneration, and consumption that only

serves to leave more and more residue behind in it’s wake. The resin of our acts of disposal, the

inaction, elevated “PMR’s”, the imbalance, and throwing away as an act of forgetting results in a

system that over time begins to breakdown under the weight of it’s own disposal.

A landfill is a place for things to breakdown, to put out smells, and functions as a place to

frame waste, and things as waste. The landscape of a landfill is the most sublime frontier of the

contemporary era, and moving forward society will essentially have to back track, as it scrambles

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to resist falling in on itself, to create models and systems that allow for the conquering and

claiming of trash monuments. Landfills, are dumps where we confront the forceful presence of

things just sinking into themselves, broken and decaying no longer bound by their role or value

to society. Our tools, and containers, packaging, and paper when found at the landfill is no longer

relatable as it once was without the availability of the medium of expression the technology

employed to relate it’s use and meaning. Our objects speak as much as we make use of them, and

after their disposal the limitations said to determine it’s usefulness provide us with the

mythology making up its movement from production to regulation and consumption, and finally

use and eventual disposal, or possible near 100% recycling of the materials. At this stage

recycling is just an effort in extending the lifespan of useful materials, with each stage of

recycling exponentially limiting its potential usefulness or ability to be recycled again. In this

sense, recycling is a movement granting ourselves the ability to extend our responsibility of the

disposal and recycling of products through space and time to the future.

The worldwide ‘slimming down’ of landfills through increased regulation based off more

policy concern in environmental affairs is the stagnation of, and an attempt to neutralize and

off­set current modes of production and waste. In 2012 the EPA reported that Americans

“generated about 251 million tons of trash and recycled and composted almost 87 million tons of

this material”, equivalent to a 34.5 percent recycling rate. Or, as the report goes on to detail

“personal impact”, Americans “recycled and composted 1.51 pounds out of our individual waste

generation rate of 4.38 pounds per person per day”(EPA). These numbers are generated by

looking at the generation and recycling rates of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) compared to

population rates and rates of recycling by region. This EPA report glorifies the trend it sees with

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the recycling rate having increased; “from less than 10 percent of MSW generated in 1980 to

over 34 percent in 2012” (EPA). This trend analysis is centered in the formation of landfills, and

the waste that we try our hardest to forget is only represented in these numbers and stats as the

difference when subtracted from the presented and well­packaged numbers we trust to represent

our impact. Their presence doesn’t detract from the positive results, and the progress that society

sees itself as making, because the things we try to forget are never readily apparent, as the entire

system is centered around making the objective disposal of our materials as easy and guilt­free as

possible.

These guilt­free models result in the monumental trash mountain ranges that make­up the world's

largest landfills. The problem with these landfills, and with the certainty we assign to them, is

that the containment provided by landfills is always potentially temporary. Eventually, unless

their is very stringent efforts being deployed to maintain the landfill, landfills will spill and leak,

and return to society their congealed chemical concoctions that we perceive as the result of the

“natural” (mythologized) processes, in an attempt to assign our guilt elsewhere. Engineers

design, model, and test complex technologies for leachate, and other toxic chemical containment,

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and then describe the consequences of landfill corruption and failure. The breadth and general

mind­blowing statistical variance of these toxic chemicals is expressed by Brian Wynne, in his

book Risk Management and Hazardous Waste, that details that if all of the world’s laboratories

tested chemical toxicity, only about 500 of the over seven million chemicals known to exist

could be tested per year (48). Successful landfill design and aftercare, in engineering terms,

extends to perhaps one hundred years, a mere moment in space and time, and in terms of

geological time one hundred years is a mere instant. By this, landfills are made and maintained

until a set date with the knowledge in mind that this maintenance is only temporary and

eventually the “natural” processes making up and containing the landfills will begin to spread

their influence back into our “clean” spaces.

The fragmentation of our products and consumer goods results in an unquantifiable

plethora of chemical output and seepage that we miserably attempt to package up for future

technologies and future societies to handle, and hopefully deal with, with their, hopefully, more

advanced technologies, and ways of understanding our environment. Our model of trash disposal

depends, or is based on the idea that, the advancement of technology and society will be able to

compensate for our past mishandling of waste. This model, or system is self­defeating in the

sense that the voluminous ever­evolving trash supply is growing and changing (becoming more

volatile) at a rate faster than society’s progress and technology has the ability to combat these

issues. Mainly, the concept of placing culpability or responsibility on our future selves is ironic,

because the array of impact and risk assessment can’t justify our disposal wants and needs and

satisfy the state of consumer capitalism in the present. The more trash we create and package up

for our future selves the smaller the ROI for our future technologies and societies. The harder the

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burden, the riskier the gamble. The practice of server virtualization in data centers is mirrored by

landfills in the way that we virtualize borders of time and space and presuppose the limits and

excess of the future. Each landfill across the world is connected not only through the similarity

of being hard to define and relate to, but by the shared space they take up in the future. And, with

digital divides, and less developed countries, some of these landfills are much riskier gambles

that exponentially increase the presupposed future impact and risk that landfills in general pose

to our future selves. But, unlike gambling in human society, where the riskier bet means the

greater the reward, gambling with landfills is only already an attempt to reach neutral. It is a

mission to reach one. An essential singularity where goods and trash are one in the same, a

seemingly impossible semantic breach, but all together it is the only positive result despite what

society may deem progress. Betting on the future of a landfill, the future of your trash, is

gambling with negatives. The more you get, the less you gain.

To preach against a landfill though is equivalent to preaching against the Earth itself. In

terms, of what supports human life and society as we know it, the two are just about equal in

terms of relevance. The computer I type this essay on, the internet access allowing me to

research it’s topics, and the components that go into making this product a tool of presentation

and representation implicitly implicate any argument against landfills or models of waste that I

could make using this computer as a stage. But, to do it any other way doesn’t necessarily

reverse, or solve the issue. But, then again, this essay isn’t about providing solutions. We, as a

society haven’t even done most of the groundwork to understand how trash impacts, and how

trash becomes us. We proliferate trash, but we aren’t it’s creators. We are it’s molders,

containers, and movers, but we aren’t the creators. Rather, it’s much more likely that it’s the

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other way around. If we can read against the grain, and look back towards human society with

trash as mirror to focus, then we can compel the argument that it was our waste that got us here.

The things we try to forget and attempt to ignore despite their status as monuments to everything

we can, have, and attempt to achieve are powerful and important to the actual conditions of being

human that we put to the side as we relegate and perpetuate our own status as achievers, and

non­believers.

In 2016 the best model, besides landfills, to figure society’s disconnect from its ecology

and geology, from its waste, is data storage. According to IBM, everyday we create 2.5

quintillion bytes of data. The same as downloading about a half billion HD movie downloads.

And, in 2016 over 31% of large enterprises handle at least 1 petabyte of storage. With Americans

consuming about 3.6 zettabytes of information every year, with an upward trend, the most

prolific waste centers in the world exist in data centers and hard drives, a not­exactly ephemeral

monument different from landfills in the extent of the spread and proliferation of both data

centers and individual hard drives. The tools of visualization employed with imagining the

virtual spread of data centers, doesn’t realize the impact that data centers have on energy

consumption, and the storage of zettabytes worth of data has on the environment. This essay is

another piece of that data dump as soon as it’s save file is established on my Google Drive.

Google has what’s soon to be twenty data centers around the world, with an energy consumption

rate that can be realized globally as 0.01% of global energy consumption. My essay adds to the

0.01%, but it also adds to my individual tally of energy consumption, the energy consumption of

the teacher I submit this too, and the energy consumption of my computer’s lifespan in general.

This doesn’t invalidate me writing this paper, or the use of data storage, it just renders it in the

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scale from an individual writing a 900KB paper and storing it in the cloud, to the total data dump

that is Google’s at least 900,000 individual servers. Where do lines of culpability get drawn

when it’s impossible to diminish the scale of data storage? This essay doesn’t exist without the

cooperation of untold human activity. From the generation of the computer, it base components

and chemicals, designs and software, and my energy and will, to buy the computer, and write the

essay, are all inseparable in terms of how much they impacted the formation of this paper, this

class, me being where I am.

The data dumps of the world and the landfills exist alongside each other in terms of their

spread, but exist alongside each other with how we represent them in our imagination. The

location of a landfill is a mystery in the mind of the typical waste producer, just as the function

of data storage and the not­so­ephemeral spread of data is a mystery in the mind of the typical

user. Words like document, file, folder, drive, and cloud separate the user’s perception of their

data creation from the actual conditions of computer use, just as throwing your trash in a trash

bin to be collected on the sidewalk separates you from the responsibility of waste. The virtual

ubiquitous cloud, and the monumental heaps of waste in landfills are two sides of the same coin,

in that they function alongside each other, and both benefit from perpetuation of the same sort of

separation between people and the things they metabolize.

As symbols of waste, zettabytes and large landfills represent places where our

relationship to our environment goes to be forgotten. In throwing away, and proliferating data we

are essentially engaged in increasing the time and space that our existence takes up. We

appropriate ourselves into the future by leaving countless remnants of our activity. These

remnants make­up the construct of human culture, our ways of understanding and models of

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interpretation are filtered through the waste we add to the dump. Mainly, as this paper functions

to enlighten the problems in its own production, landfills and data storage work to keep their

function and means of dissolution under containment. As a whole the concept of waste defies

conception. Use and out of use are evolutionary concepts. And, things like essay’s have an

intangible source of meaning, that, depending on their implementation, can be become useful

over and over again. As things we consider art have meaning that possibly never expire, some

data, and some waste, is meant to be created for the use that we can extract from it; maybe at it’s

most base level it’s a matter of disseminating what makes a typical user, and what models can

break a user out of typical models of excess and waste.

Works Cited

Environmental Protection Agency(EPA). Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States. United States Environmental Protection Agency Solid Waste and Emergency Response. Washington, DC; 2014. Online. Conference Board of Canada. Environment: Municipal Waste Generation. 2008. Online. Statistics Canada. Waste Management Industry Survey: Business and Government Sectors, 2006. Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2008. Online.

Wynne, Brian. Risk Management and Hazardous Waste: Implementation and Dialectics of Credibility. Berlin: Springer, 1987. Print.